The Park, a sprawling mouth of shadows, swallowed the last yawns of daylight as a chill crept along the grass. Leaves skittered like frightened promises across the benches, and a solitary streetlamp flickered with the stubborn glow of a tired lighthouse in fog. It was Halloween, all the way from the first orange of dusk to the final graveyard hush of midnight, but tonight the park wore its spookiness with a slow, almost reverent patience. In the oldest corner, where trees bent like old storytellers, stood a park bench weathered by more conversations than the town library cared to admit. Its wood bore the quilted marks of a hundred seasons, and two iron arms were etched with the names of picnics that had never forgotten the taste of summer. It looked as ordinary as a seat can look when it has learned to listen.
From the creak of those iron joints rose a sigh, a breath of something long unspent. The bench shuddered, not with fear but with memory, and then like a page turning in a book left out in the rain something began to unthread itself from the wood beneath the seat. It wasn’t a ghost in the blustering, streaking sense; it was more precise, more patient: a skeleton, radiant in a pale, glimmering fear, stepping from the bench as if the bench itself was a cocoon. The bones wore a suit of dust and old dusk, a cloak of autumn’s last sighs. The skull tilted, the jaw creaked, and a rough, cheerful voice once bright, now hollow whistled from it. The skeleton glanced around, ears long since retired in the flesh, listening for sound remembered from a century ago: the soft chime of a bell on a bicycle, faraway laughter of a child, clink of a glass toasting the night.
“Do you hear it?” it questioned, though no one stood near to hear except the rustle of leaves and the shy tremor of a distant crow. The skeleton’s eye sockets glowed with pale blue light, not anger but insistence, a beacon in the half-light. It stood upon the bench’s edge as if on a tightrope between two lives, between then and now. It wasn’t hunting fear or chasing a haunting. It was seeking something gentler: a memory to finish, a farewell to grant, a name that could finally be spoken aloud without tremor. For years, decades perhaps, connections had frayed around the town’s Halloween festival. The living would come with lanterns and laughter, and the dead would drift with the wind, collecting the crumbs of the day’s happiness.
But this particular night, a thread tugged the skeleton toward the living world: a letter, long misplaced, written by a girl who had grown up and learned to forget the names she used to call her neighbours. The letter, tucked in a desk drawer of a house long since gone quiet, spoke of a promise to return, to tell a story that would bind the living and the dead in a single breath. The skeleton found the bench because it was the last place the girl, now a grown woman, sat with her grandmother on the night of her tenth birthday. The grandmother whispered a ritual in her ear, one that promised that on Halloween, the veil between the worlds would open just enough for a small truth to cross.
So the skeleton waited, patient as a librarian who knows every overdue book by heart. It listened for the creak of a distant gate, the soft sigh of a bicycle tyre, the whisper of a name spoken in the dark. And when the woman finally arrived, lantern in hand and pockets full of memories, the corridor between then and now widened. The skeleton stepped forward, not to frighten but to answer.
“Is it you?” the woman asked, voice tremulous yet steady.
“I am you, once,” the skeleton replied, its voice a wind through dry leaves. “And you, perhaps, are me, once more, if we tell the story true.”
It spoke the name they had promised to remember together, and with that, the park exhaled a quiet sigh of relief. The bench, no longer merely wood and iron, settled back into its old, patient seat, and the night hummed with the soft glow of restored promises.
Why now? Because Halloween is the hour when endings learn to breathe again, and beginnings, too, are given a chance to stand in the light and be remembered.
Lazarus Carpenter - Author 